Читать книгу From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry Since the Second World War - Geoffrey Owen - Страница 16

In Britain the outcome of the war was an occasion for relief and self-congratulation. While it was recognised that the war could not have been won without American help, there was a justifiable pride in the courage and unity of the British people, and in the resilience of Britain’s institutions. The concentration of effort and resources on winning the war had been achieved, as one participant wrote later, with ‘a spirit of social cohesion and a perception of fairness which could hardly have been bettered’.³³ When Winston Churchill displaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister in 1940, he invited senior Labour politicians to join the war cabinet, including Clement Attlee as Deputy Prime Minister and Ernest Bevin, head of the Transport and General Workers Union, as Minister of Labour. There was close co-operation between government, employers and trade unions throughout the war, and in planning for post-war reconstruction. The Beveridge report on social insurance, published in 1942, and the 1944 White Paper on employment policy reflected a broad agreement across the political spectrum on the priorities which should guide post-war governments: to maintain full employment and to prevent a repetition of the social hardships of the inter-war years.

Much of this consensus survived Labour’s victory in the 1945 general election. Although the election campaign was acrimonious – Churchill claimed that the socialist state which Labour wanted to introduce could not be run without a Gestapo, while Aneurin Bevan, a Labour left-winger, insisted that the election represented ‘a struggle for power between Big Business and the people’³⁴ – the gap between the parties was less wide than the rhetoric suggested. Labour’s landslide victory did not mark the conversion of Britain to socialism.³⁵ By presenting a manifesto which combined social reform with an extension of government control over the economy, the Labour Party convinced the voters that it was more likely than the Conservatives to ensure that the unemployment and stagnation of the 1930s did not return. Labour, under the cautious leadership of Clement Attlee, was offering a set of measures that built on the wartime consensus and added to it a number of social programmes, including the creation of a National Health Service, that were widely agreed to be necessary. Attlee and most of his closest colleagues favoured a mixed economy in which the role of government would be powerful but not overwhelming. There was also an assumption that the partnership between government, employers and unions which had been established during the war would continue.

The most pressing economic problem was the financial legacy of the war. The war had been paid for by borrowing, mainly from sterling area countries, and by the sale of overseas investments, supplemented by aid from the US under the Lend-Lease programme. With the abrupt termination of this programme at the end of the war, Britain was faced with an alarming gap between its foreign exchange outgoings, including debt repayments and overseas military expenditure, and its income from exports.³⁶ A new American loan was negotiated at the end of 1945, but strict conditions were attached to it, including a requirement that the pound should be made freely convertible into dollars in 1947; there was also pressure from the Americans to dismantle the imperial preference system and open up the British market to imports.

Britain’s balance of payments remained fragile throughout Labour’s period in office, necessitating a strenuous effort to hold back domestic consumption in favour of exports. Because of this financial weakness, Britain’s economic situation after the war was not as favourable as it seemed compared to Germany and France. Although Britain had sustained less physical damage, the two Continental countries did not have a large foreign debt to service, nor did they have the international obligations which stemmed from Britain’s shared responsibility with the US and the Soviet Union for supervising the transition from war to peace. The Labour government had the difficult task of correcting the balance of payments while at the same time pursuing its social objectives and fulfilling its overseas commitments. Despite severe setbacks, including the abandonment of sterling convertibility in 1947 and the devaluation of the pound in 1949, the balancing act was successful. By the time Labour left office in 1951, Britain’s overseas finances had been strengthened, full employment had been maintained, and a substantial social programme had been carried through.

Some historians have argued that the Attlee government devoted too much attention and resources to social welfare at the expense of what should have been a much higher priority – the modernisation of industry.³⁷ But Attlee and his colleagues were well aware of the need for higher productivity. The problem was not that their priorities were wrong or that too much money was spent in other areas, but that their industrial policies were not well conceived. In its election manifesto Labour had committed itself to planning and an extension of the public sector through nationalisation. How the plan was to be formulated, and what machinery would be set up to implement it, was left vague. Most of the wartime controls – over imports, over access to foreign exchange, over the allocation of raw materials – were still in place, and they were used by the government to support the export drive. But no new planning instruments were introduced. The proposed National Investment Board, which was to ‘determine social priorities and promote better timing in private investment’, was not set up, perhaps because the government thought that, by nationalising some of the most capital-intensive industries, it would have sufficient control over investment.³⁸ In principle the extension of public ownership enabled the government to plan at least part of the economy. But there was no link between nationalisation and planning. The impetus behind nationalisation was partly ideological. For left-wingers like Aneurin Bevan it was a way of ensuring that ‘effective social and economic power passes from one order of society to another’.³⁹ But most ministers saw public ownership as a way of solving particular problems in particular sectors, not as a step towards a socialist economy. Three of the industries which were taken over, gas, electricity and the railways, had been subject to government regulation before the war. The regulatory arrangements had not worked well, and public ownership could be defended as a more effective means of ensuring that these ‘natural monopolies’ were managed effectively in the public interest.⁴⁰ The most ideologically motivated nationalisation was that of steel, but even this could be presented as a way of dealing with the structural weaknesses in the industry which had not been tackled in the 1930s.

No serious consideration was given to extending public ownership beyond steel to other manufacturing industries, and the drive for higher productivity in the private sector took the form of exhortation and persuasion. The most active propagandist was Stafford Cripps, who served first as President of the Board of Trade and later as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He created a production efficiency service within the Board of Trade, supported the establishment of the British Institute of Management, and with Marshall Plan funds helped to set up the Anglo-American Council on Productivity, which sent teams of managers and workers to the US to study American manufacturing methods. Cripps also established working parties in a number of industries soon after the war, through which employers and unions could identify obstacles to higher productivity and work out plans for removing them. The government intended to convert these bodies into development councils with statutory powers, and legislation for this purpose was passed in 1947. But employers were unenthusiastic, fearing that the councils would cut across the work of existing trade associations. Only a few were were set up, and, apart from the Cotton Board (an existing organisation which was reconstituted as a development council), they were in minor industries.⁴¹

An important strand in the productivity drive was the promotion of greater co-operation between trade unions and employers. But the government did not contemplate any major change in the institutions of collective bargaining, still less a wholesale reform of the labour relations system. The only initiative which might have altered relationships at the shop floor level was an attempt in 1947 to relaunch the factory-based joint production committees, which had had some success during the war. However, many employers saw the committees as a step towards workers’ control, while the unions were anxious to ensure that they did not trespass into the field of wages and conditions, which should be left to the established channels of collective bargaining.⁴² Some union leaders were also concerned that joint production committees might be used as a vehicle for Communist shop stewards to increase their influence. Although the TUC and the major unions were fully supportive of the productivity drive, they were wary of any moves which might restrict their bargaining freedom. The employers, for their part, were determined to maintain their managerial prerogatives and to resist any encroachment either from the state or from the unions.⁴³ For the government to have banged heads together, or to have imposed labour relations reform by legislation, was politically out of the question. Ministers needed the cooperation of the trade unions in holding wages down (and in preventing strikes), and that of the employers in increasing production and exports. Thus the status quo was preserved.

An alternative approach for promoting industrial efficiency would have been to inject more competition into the economy, by taking action against price-fixing agreements and by opening up the home market to imports. But the Labour Part’s attitude to competition was ambivalent. Many of its members were suspicious of the profit motive and preferred public ownership or public regulation to unfettered competition. Others argued that in industries where nationalisation was not feasible, private enterprise should be forced to become more enterprising, and this called for a vigorous competition policy. The 1945 manifesto contained a promise that ‘anti-social’ restrictive practices in industry would be prohibited. But it was not until 1948 that a Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Commission was set up, with limited powers. There was no automatic assumption that cartels were against the public interest; each case had to be looked at on its merits. By 1951 the Commission had published only two reports, and its impact on the behaviour of companies was negligible. Cartelisation was probably even more pervasive in the early 1950s than it had been in the 1930s.⁴⁴

As for competition from imports, the weakness of the balance of payments ruled out any immediate removal of the tariff and quota restrictions which had been in force since 1932. The government was also determined to retain imperial preference, despite strong criticism from the US. Friction with the Americans over trade policy increased after the announcement of the Marshall Plan. The US government was pressing for Britain to take the lead in European economic integration, but Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, insisted that Britain was ‘not just another European country’.⁴⁵ As leader of the Commonwealth and America’s most important ally, Britain wanted to co-operate with the US in managing a one-world system which would include the Continental countries, but not as a separate trading bloc. In 1950, in a decision which had profound implications for future relations with Continental Europe, the Attlee government decided against membership of the European Coal and Steel Community.⁴⁶ Britain was not prepared to cede sovereignty over two of its most important industries to a supranational authority. The Labour Party was also hostile to the idea of Britain throwing in its lot with countries which did not share its commitment to full employment and a planned economy. Many people in the Party deplored the electoral swing to the right in France and Germany. Aneurin Bevan saw the defeat of the German Social Democrats in 1949 as ‘one of the blackest days in the history of post-war Europe’,⁴⁷ and there was a widespread feeling that economic liberalism as practised on the Continent was a prescription for social injustice.⁴⁸

Some economists in the Board of Trade favoured membership of the Coal and Steel Community on the grounds that the steel industry would benefit from being exposed to European competition, but this was a minority view. The negative reaction to the Schuman Plan was indicative not only of the government’s lack of enthusiasm for competition, but also of the low priority which it attached to trade with Europe. In the immediate aftermath of the war Germany’s absence from world markets created an opportunity for British manufacturers to increase their exports, and some of the restrictions imposed on Germany – for example, the ban on aircraft production – were designed to help British industry. But the idea of Britain replacing Germany as the main supplier of manufactured goods to European markets was not seriously entertained, even less so after the US change of policy in 1947. The general assumption was that in due course Germany would resume its prewar trade position in Europe, and that British industry would have little to gain from entering into head-on competition with German manufacturers in their natural market. As an internal government memorandum put it as early as 1946, ‘where German essential goods compete with the United Kingdom, it will be better for Germany to supply Europe and ourselves to concentrate on non-European markets’.⁴⁹

In relation to Europe, as in most other areas of domestic and foreign policy, the Conservative government which took office in 1951 continued along broadly the same lines as its predecessor. In 1952 another opportunity to join the European Coal and Steel Community was rejected, and the British government played no part in the negotiations which led to the creation of the Common Market. Its position was that since the bulk of the country’s trade was outside Europe, it would gain nothing from membership of a narrow European trade bloc which might discriminate against the rest of the world. The movement towards European integration seemed ‘at best irrelevant to Britain’s economic self-interest and at worst a political nuisance which had to be tolerated, if only in public, because of the Americans’.⁵⁰

In contrast to France and Germany, the challenge which Britain faced in the first decade after the war did not call for a radical break with pre-war institutions and policies. The biggest change was the enlargement of the government’s role in managing the economy and the focus on full employment as the prime economic objective. This was the consensus which emerged from the war, and Labour was remarkably successful in fulfilling the goals laid down in the 1944 White Paper. Keith Middlemas has suggested that the Attlee government may have been almost too successful in setting the pattern of post-war Britain. ‘It may, in the long run, have been unfortunate that so much was achieved in an extraordinarily fluid period at the war’s end which then set quickly in a particular mould before the 1950s began. Subsequently, the system could not easily be altered, even if it appeared no longer suitable to changing circumstances.’⁵¹

In the first half of the 1950s the system did not appear to need changing. Living standards were rising, unemployment and inflation were kept low, and the mixed economy which had been forged during and after the war seemed capable of meeting the aspirations of the people. In the second half of the decade this comfortable state of affairs came under threat on two fronts. First, the British economy was clearly under-performing in comparison with West Germany and other Continental countries. Second, social consensus was breaking down. With full employment taken for granted, self-restraint on the part of trade unions and their members in pressing for higher wages was fading fast. In the 1960s the search began, first under the Conservatives and then under Harold Wilson’s Labour government from 1964 to 1970, for ways of remedying the flaws in the post-war settlement.